-- EARLY DETECTION NETWORK/WARNING SYSTEM -- I MAY OF FOUND A CLUE

I noticed that that once you type in the correct coordinates and activate the countdown on the MacHeist Early Detection Network / Early Warning System, you will hear music in the background. This may be completely useless information, but I am pretty sure that this is the music played when earning captain points once completing an adventure in Spore Galactic Adventures. Could this be a subtle hint at a future MacHeist Game Bundle? This may be completely useless info, or it may mean something.

Any similarities aren't intended, and the music was composed for the teaser page. My guess is that they were also going for a 'spacey, mysterious twinkly' type sound for their space setting? I'm curious to hear the music you're referencing though in Spore.

I'm gonna start by apologizing in advance because I know I'm gonna sound like a pretentious prick, but PLEASE stop using "I may OF." This makes absolutely no sense in English. You're looking for "I may'VE" which is a contraction of "I may HAVE." Think about it. "Of" is a preposition, used in situations such as "out OF this world," or "I can't think OF the correct way to use OF." HA! Sorry, bad joke.

Anywho, along with the misuse of "your & you're" and "their, there, and they're," this is my biggest grammar peeve, and it's selfish of me but I have to stop people from constantly using it or I will go insane. And yes, I know the argument of "well, it's just phonetic" and whatnot, but I'm sorry, that's no excuse.

I'm gonna start by apologizing in advance because I know I'm gonna sound like a pretentious prick, but PLEASE stop using "I may OF." This makes absolutely no sense in English. You're looking for "I may'VE" which is a contraction of "I may HAVE." Think about it. "Of" is a preposition, used in situations such as "out OF this world," or "I can't think OF the correct way to use OF." HA! Sorry, bad joke.

Anywho, along with the misuse of "your & you're" and "their, there, and they're," this is my biggest grammar peeve, and it's selfish of me but I have to stop people from constantly using it or I will go insane. And yes, I know the argument of "well, it's just phonetic" and whatnot, but I'm sorry, that's no excuse.

I'm gonna start by apologizing in advance because I know I'm gonna sound like a pretentious prick, but PLEASE stop using "I may OF." This makes absolutely no sense in English. You're looking for "I may'VE" which is a contraction of "I may HAVE." Think about it. "Of" is a preposition, used in situations such as "out OF this world," or "I can't think OF the correct way to use OF." HA! Sorry, bad joke.

Anywho, along with the misuse of "your & you're" and "their, there, and they're," this is my biggest grammar peeve, and it's selfish of me but I have to stop people from constantly using it or I will go insane. And yes, I know the argument of "well, it's just phonetic" and whatnot, but I'm sorry, that's no excuse.

Now about bad grammar; I've always wondered how despite working in a field which requires attention to detail, one where users are mocked when they say their operating system is MS Office, can we so carelessly abuse language and grammar.

OMG I may well be in love with this thread. I teach writing and feel as if I am throwing sand into the wind. Loose for lose, hear for here, misuse of their, they're and there, it's for its--it's is not possessive, it is a contraction--and the list goes on and on and on.

Grammar geeks unite

desertdemocrat▛▞▞▟ Proud Member of the BLUE Team™ ▙▚▚▜"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." - Groucho MarxThinking it Through

Even worse for me is when people use "loose" when they really meant to say "lose". Ugh.

The one that gets me because it's SO common (literally more common than the correct usage) in gaming boards is substituting "rouge" for rogue. Yeah, your level 48 rouge is totally badass bro, and it is so manly that you are teabagging corpses while yelling expletives in a high pitched 11 year old voice into your headset

Watching Stargate Universe yesterday, a character fell into an ice break while collecting water for the ship. I mentioned to my wife at that moment, that he'd fallen into a "crevasse", pointing out that a "crevice" is a crack in the earth, where a "crevasse" is a crack in ice. Sure enough, the character helping him radioed back to the ship that he'd fallen into a "crevasse." Satisfied that they got it right, I continued watching, only to witness in the next scene a woman alerting her friend that the aforementioned character has fallen into a "crevice!" Grrrr!

Everyone, it seems, uses "lay" when they mean "lie". Just listen out for it in any TV programme or film in particular (let alone printed media).

"Lay low" replaces "lie low" whenever you hear the phrase. "Lay of the land"... well, that's actually a bit rude, as it refers to a loose woman, in the same way as saying that she's "the good time that was had by all". But it seems to be used universally, now, to mean "lie of the land".

(I accept that this may be an American versus British thing. But even so.)

I don't understand why people struggle with this. Its not to hard for people too work out where it's apostrophe should go. Their aren't heaps of places to put it, but it seems to me that a lot of people don't think about there writing. Perhaps its just two hard too put the effort into haveing correct punctuation, speling and grammer.

...if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious."

I don't understand why people struggle with this. Its not to hard for people too work out where it's apostrophe should go. Their aren't heaps of places to put it, but it seems to me that a lot of people don't think about there writing. Perhaps its just two hard too put the effort into haveing correct punctuation, speling and grammer.

Because a general rule is that the apostrophe is either a contraction or possessive. Its/it's almost flies in the face of that rule, as in:

Rover's paw hurt. The dog licked its paw.

Seems a little inconsistent if you don't really know your English well. One reasoning could be that since "it's" is a contraction for "it is", so to eliminate confusion, the possessive should be distinctly different.

Because a general rule is that the apostrophe is either a contraction or possessive. Its/it's almost flies in the face of that rule, as in:

Rover's paw hurt. The dog licked its paw.

Seems a little inconsistent if you don't really know your English well. One reasoning could be that since "it's" is a contraction for "it is", so to eliminate confusion, the possessive should be distinctly different.

I'm trying to work out whether I count that as a successful troll, or not

I'm the "second set of eyes" at work; I get to review anything that goes out the door for errors - grammatical or otherwise.

The other part of my job is tech support, where I get to be on the constant receiving end of the worst kind of abuses of the English language imaginable.

It's enough to drive a man to drink.

...if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious."

You give MacHeist's users absolutely no credit for being a diverse and multi-national group. Not everyone here comes from an English-speaking country, and many here have English as their third or fourth language (me included).

There are certainly places where grammar-nazis and spelling-pervs have their place - this isn't one of them.

I for one always have to think twice where the apostrophe should be in "your'e / you're", "they're / theyr'e" etc., since in neither Icelandic nor Swedish is it customary to mangle the language with apostrophes.

The world is a tad bigger place than North-America and "some fallen empire based off of a small island in the east", and it's somewhat astonishing to see grammar and spelling complaints coming from an aussie, considering your whereabouts - none of your neighbours to the north speak a shred of English worth mentioning...

The world is a tad bigger place than North-America and "some fallen empire based off of a small island in the east", and it's somewhat astonishing to see grammar and spelling complaints coming from an aussie, considering your whereabouts - none of your neighbours to the north speak a shred of English worth mentioning...

Actually, it was a definite troll. I filled that post with grammatical and spelling errors just to be funny.

Unfortunately, it was just after I'd woken up, and before I'd had my coffee, and I can see now how it looks like I'm having a go :S

Failed troll has failed.

...if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious."

You give MacHeist's users absolutely no credit for being a diverse and multi-national group. Not everyone here comes from an English-speaking country, and many here have English as their third or fourth language (me included).

There are certainly places where grammar-nazis and spelling-pervs have their place - this isn't one of them.

I for one always have to think twice where the apostrophe should be in "your'e / you're", "they're / theyr'e" etc., since in neither Icelandic nor Swedish is it customary to mangle the language with apostrophes.

The world is a tad bigger place than North-America and "some fallen empire based off of a small island in the east", and it's somewhat astonishing to see grammar and spelling complaints coming from an aussie, considering your whereabouts - none of your neighbours to the north speak a shred of English worth mentioning...

EDIT: Spelling fixed...

That being said, there are a lot of people who can't use English properly who really should know better; e.g. us folks in North America, by which I mean native born North Americans. Hell, from my time in school, I've see that it's the immigrants who often have better knowledge of spelling and grammar. I see that all the time on emails, papers I've read, and labs I've marked. Bad grammar is everywhere over here.

Oh I'm so glad I'm not the only anal jerk! I fear the net is destroying the English language to the point where one can't tell whether the writer is typing fast, has only a basic grasp of grammar (and spelling), or just doesn't give a shit.

Despite the fact that I really want Daisy Disk, I thank rbr for pointing out this ugliest of all English usage cock-ups.

With the possible exception of "You've got another THING coming"

PS: Ever notice how when someone points out something pedantic like this someone else manages to find a mistake in THEIR grammar?

You give MacHeist's users absolutely no credit for being a diverse and multi-national group. Not everyone here comes from an English-speaking country, and many here have English as their third or fourth language (me included).

First of all, speaking personally, I want to point out that I'm not here to criticise anyone, least of all those whose native language is not English. The English language is one of my interests, and this thread of people's pet grammatical peeves therefore appealed to me. Call it anal or whatever, but some people take an interest in such things, and it's possible to have an entertaining discussion about it without implying any personal criticism.

I am a writer and former magazine editor (among other things) and I still spend a lot of my time working with words. From that position of experience I can say with complete honesty that I've used freelance writers from many different countries, and the thing that has generally struck me in doing so is how much better the quality of written English tends to be from foreigners than from native speakers.

Clearly this is hardly a universal truth. Some of my native English-speaking writers (from both the UK and NZ) were outstandingly good, of course, and foreigners (notably from Germany and Denmark) writing in English tended, understandably enough, to lack the easy flow and use of colloquialisms that one would expect from a native speaker. Nevertheless, if it was good grammar, good sense and generally high standards that I was looking for (which indeed it was), I found that I could generally rely on the non-native speakers to provide it, whereas the native English writers could frequently be careless and slap-dash.

To me, this says a lot about the relative quality of education in the UK and overseas. My experience of Americans is relatively limited in terms of editing their writing, and of course we are separated by a common language, so there are things that Americans consider correct that I don't like (and probably vice versa): such as my previous "lay of the land" example. My personal experience is primarily with British English, and the versions of English learnt as a foreign language by Europeans.

My other main point is that English is fluid and evolves constantly. Grammar rules are only a convention, and they change over time. For anyone who would like to know more about this, I would recommend reading David Crystal's The Stories of English, which is most illuminating (if a little heavy-going at times).

As with any argument, there are two sides: on the one hand, there are Grammar Nazis who lay down the law in black and white terms and say that such-and-such a usage is right or wrong, full stop. On the other, there are the people at the other end of the spectrum who don't know or don't care about grammar and spelling, and think that making oneself understood is all that matters.

Neither position is right. Personally I veer very much toward the Grammar Nazi, but I have to recognise the fact that we are dealing with conventions, and conventions that are not even universal. Conventions of spelling, punctuation and grammar change substantially within a single region over a period of years (it's easy to look back and see marked changes in the use of punctuation within British English literature within the last half-century, for example), and do not necessarily coincide between regions: American English is punctuated substantially differently from British English. (Note that, if I were American, I would probably have written: "American English is punctuated substantially differently than British English.")

To give a few simple examples, American English generally favours use of the Oxford Comma ("one, two, and three") whereas British English generally does not ("one, two and three"). But some British publishers insist on using it (not least Oxford University Press) and some American publishers insist on not using it. As a second example, British English makes a distinction between abbreviations and contractions ("Co(mpany)" would be abbreviated to "Co." - with a dot at the end - whereas "L(imi)t(e)d" would be contracted to "Ltd" - without a dot; American English would put a dot after "Ltd." because it treats the two cases as the same). Finally, the American use of "of" personally really annoys me a lot, because frequently it's omitted where it's clearly needed ("out the window" instead of "out of the window") and inserted where it equally clearly isn't wanted ("off of", which is totally redundant). But that's the convention that has arisen through popular usage, and is now 'correct' American English usage. The fact that I really dislike it is neither here nor there.

These are all conventions which boil down to being little more than publishers' house styles: you can consciously choose which to use and be 'right' regardless of your preference. As for other grammatical usages, they change over time, and dictionaries and rule-books are updated periodically not to set out what's right and wrong, but to formalise established convention that reflects how grammar works today.

So to be a true Grammar Nazi is to deny progress and refuse to accept the possibility of change. But that is not the same as saying that people should ignore the rules and pretend that they don't matter or that people don't care about them. As with most things in life, steering a middle course and accommodating other points of view is the best way to avoid problems. There are few absolutes, and grammar rules are no exception.